As I have noted repeatedly, I do not have a particularly big axe to grind when it comes to race (see my thoughts on the subjecthere); I am far more interested in what a person thinks than in his quantity of melanin. But I am old enough to know that Buchanan is right; this country has undergone an enormous demographic change since I was a child. I was born in 1962. Immigration law was changed, courtesy of "The Swimmer," in the mid-60s. When I was a child, the country was about ten percent black, and everyone else that you saw in Oklahoma was either white or Native American or a mixture of the two (as am I, at least a wee bit). You rarely saw Latinos.

Now, to reiterate, since I know beyond any shadow ever cast by any doubt, that some will take what I am saying here and try to make it out as though I hate brown people, there's not a darn thing in the world wrong with Latinos. I served with many in the USMC Reserve; my wife is half-Mexican by heritage, etc. All I am trying to point out is that prior to those immigration reforms and the flood of immigration, both legal and illegal, but especially illegal, there was a greater degree of cultural homogeneity than there is today. The most graphic illustration of the point is the presence of bilingual labels on darn near everything you buy. When I was a child and a teenager, no one even thought of such a thing. It was completely unnecessary. By the time I had become a young adult, you occasionally saw a bilingual label, and it was the object of mockery. Now--it is de rigeur.

We have carried a desire for diversity and tolerance to the point where we are being threatened with balkanization and civil strife. We have, out of a desire for "fairness," (you can make Americans absolutely hose themselves by accusing them of being "unfair," so highly do they prize the concept of fairness), allowed what is, historically, overwhelmingly the dominant faith of the land, the faith whose precepts and concepts undergird our conception of man's rights and our system of government, to be marginalized and sometimes even ostracized. A misplaced faith in "free trade" (again, not the same thing at all as "free markets") has resulted in the mass exportation of our manufacturing capacity (and this is actually cheered by fools who have never so much as operated a lathe and have no idea how much mental and physical labor is involved, and how impossible it would be to rebuild our manufacturing base on short notice, should war, for example, ever make it necessary). The brainless idea that we can spend poverty out of existence has created only more poverty and a wave of seriously bad attitudes on the part of people we are allegedly trying to help.

Now, what to do?

Knowing perfectly well that there is not a snowball's chance of this ever actually happening, this is what I suggest needs to happen. Here, for what it's worth, is the MOTW prescription:

1) America's Christians need to quit excusing themselves from talking about their faith on the grounds that they're afraid they might "screw it up" or "drive somebody away," which is the excuse I am continually hearing. All you have to do is read your Bible consistently, go to church and serve in church consistently, and talk about your spiritual life as consistently as you talk about your interest in NASCAR. Not that hard. I am constantly amazed at our situation. I just got the latest CBD catalog in the mail yesterday, and this country is awash in Bibles, study Bibles, Bible studies, commentaries, and the like, and yet nobody feels confident enough about what they believe to speak up and talk about it. What rubbish. Quit making excuses and open your mouths. I say again: America's fundamental political precepts are drawn from a Christian heritage. You will not see a renaissance of constitutional government in this country without first seeing Christianity again becoming the overwhelmingly dominant faith in the land. It matters not whether your Christian brothers and sisters are White, Black, Latino, Mestizo, Indian, or Asian--not as long as you preach and teach the Gospel. It is the Gospel, and the ideas it carries along with it, that are important. Those ideas underly what it means to be an American.

2) Trim or eliminate income taxes and replace them with consumption taxes, that is, with tariffs or--better yet--the Fair Tax. The bottom line is that you must create a tax advantage to manufacturing in this country and quit punishing success.

3) One of those tariffs needs to be on imported oil. It must be cheaper to drill here than to import oil. We have plenty of oil and coal. We have the technology to burn coal cleanly. Every year I read of more discoveries of oil locked up somewhere in this country. It may be in oil shale or oil sands (sometimes not) or offshore, but we have plenty of dadgum oil. We can be energy independent, and energy independence, in turn, will greatly diminish the capacity of jihadis to wage war, since waging war takes money, and, sad to say, it is our payments for foreign oil that indirectly supply the jihadis with money!

Need I add the obvious, that the Federal government needs to get out of the way of the drilling?

4) Congress must execute or get off the pot, so to speak. They either need to declare war in the places our troops are committed, or they need to cut off funding. That is Congress's job.

5) We have to give up the idea of nation-building in Islamic countries. Islam and totalitarianism go together, as I have said repeatedly, like peanut butter and jelly. You will never succeed in remaking Dar al Islam into a series of representative governments. Our objective, vis-a-vis the War on Terror, has to be to keep jihadis off-balance, on the defensive, on the run, deprived of leaders and of resources (see point no. 3).

6) We have to secure our borders. The much-discussed fence is a must. We have to end all the things that make this country attractive to illegal aliens. No more public money spent on illegals. Employers must be required to verify that their employees are in the country legally. Illegals, once caught, must be deported. Congress must clarify, in law, not subject to judicial review (they have this power), that babies born in this country to illegal aliens are not citizens. People that have immigrated legally must be encouraged and assisted to fully assimilate. There must be an end to "chain immigration," as well. We should allow, or not allow, immigration on the basis of whether or not the citizens of this country benefit from it.

7) Federal spending must be drawn back to objects allowed to it in the Constitution--which will immediately result in an end to entitlement spending, obviously. This should not be a problem if point 2 is enacted; the projection is that the first year the Fair Tax is in place, the economy will grow by about ten percent, so jobs should be plentiful and if point 1 is carried out, America's churches can fulfill their historic role of helping the genuinely needy, starting with those in their own congregations.

8) We must drop any military commitments overseas that have outlived their usefulness to us. Last time I read anything on the subject, the United States has multiple treaty commitments to go to war on behalf of other nations should they be attacked, whether our interests are at stake or not. We have, I believe, troops or military obligations in some seven-hundred-plus places around the world. This is madness. US troops should be used for defending the United States.

9) Missile defense, aka "Star Wars," has to be a priority. If points 2, 7, and 8 are carried out, there should be more than enough money to make this work even better than it has so far.

Hmmmm. I guess that's enough for one day. I've probably already offended half the known universe. And you can see why I don't bother running for office.